In a big win for Democrats, a federal court panel on Wednesday upheld a new voter-approved congressional map in California that was designed to give Democrats five new seats in the U.S. House, offsetting the mid-decade gerrymander passed by Texas Republicans over the summer. Republicans challenged the map after voters overwhelmingly approved it last November, arguing that it was a racial gerrymander intended to benefit Hispanic voters. But Judge Josephine Staton, an appointee of President Barack Obama, and District Judge Wesley Hsu, an appointee of President Joe Biden, disagreed, finding that “the evidence of any racial motivation driving redistricting is exceptionally weak, while the evidence of partisan motivations is overwhelming.” They cited a 2019 opinion from the US Supreme Court ruling that partisan gerrymandering claims could not be challenged in federal court and concluded in this case that California “voters intended to adopt the Proposition 50 Map as a partisan counterweight to Texas’s redistricting.” Judge Kenneth Lee, an appointee of President Donald Trump on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote a dissenting opinion, saying he would block the map because Democrats allegedly bolstered Hispanic voting strength in one district in the Central Valley, “as part of a racial spoils system to award a key constituency that may be drifting away from the Democratic party.” Republicans will surely appeal to the Supreme Court, but may not have better luck there. When the Court upheld Texas’s congressional map in November after a lower court found that is discriminated against minority voters, Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion maintaining that it was “indisputable that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.” Though the Roberts Court has frequently sided with Republicans in election cases, it would be the height of hypocrisy for the Court to uphold Texas’s map, then strike down California’s. The California map is a major reason why Democrats have unexpectedly pulled close to even with Republicans in the gerrymandering arms race started by Trump. But the Supreme Court could still give Republicans another way to massively rig the midterms if it invalidates the key remaining section of the Voting Rights Act in a redistricting case pending from Louisiana, which could shift up to 19 House seats in the GOP’s favor, making it very difficult, if not impossible, for Democrats to retake the House in 2026.

A year ago this month, President Donald Trump granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people responsible for the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. When Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political science professor who studies domestic political violence, heard about the pardons, he says he immediately thought it was “going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency.” The first year of Trump’s second term has been a blizzard of policies and executive actions that have shattered presidential norms, been challenged in court as unlawful, threatened to remake the federal government, and redefined the limits of presidential power. But Pape argues that Trump’s decision to pardon and set free the January 6 insurrectionists, including hundreds who had been found guilty of assaulting police, could be the most consequential decision of his second term. “There are many ways we could lose our democracy. But the most worrisome way is through political violence,” Pape says. “Because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump.” Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. On this week’s More To The Story, Pape talks with host Al Letson about how America’s transformation to a white minority is fueling the nation’s growing political violence, the remarkable political geography of the insurrectionists, and the glimmers of hope he’s found in his research that democracy can survive this pivotal moment in history. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: Bob, how are you today? Robert Pape: Oh, I’m great. I’m terrific. This is just a great time to be in Chicago. A little cold, but that’s Chicago. I was about to say, great time for you. I’m a Florida boy, so I was just in Chicago, I was like, let me go home. So Bob, I thought I would kind of start off a little bit and kind of give you my background into why I’m really interested about the things that we’re going to be talking about today, right after Charlottesville happened. When I look back now, I feel like it was such a precursor for where we are today. And also I think in 2016 I was looking back and it felt like… Strangely, it felt like Oklahoma City, the bombing in Oklahoma City was a precursor for that. Ever since then, I’ve just really been thinking a lot about where we are as a society and political violence in America. The origins of it, which I think are baked deeply into the country itself. But I’m also very interested on where we’re going, because I believe that leadership plays a big role in that, right? And so when you have leaders that try to walk us back from the edge, we walk back from the edge. When you have leaders that say charge forward, we go over the edge. And it feels like in the last decade or so we’ve been see-sawing between the two things. So let me just say that you are quite right, that political violence has been a big part of our country and this is not something that is in any way new to the last few years. And that’s also why you can think about this when you talk about 2016, going back to 1995, with the Oklahoma City bombing here and thinking about things from the right and militia groups and right-wing political violence. Because that in particular from the seventies through 2016, even afterwards of course, has been a big part of our country and what we’ve experienced. But I just have to say a big but here, it’s not just the same old story. Because starting right around 2016, it would’ve been hard to know this in 2016 and even really 2017, ’18 and ’19, you were there right at the beginning of a new layer, so to speak, of political violence that is growing. It’s not that the old layer went away, which is why it’s been a little bit, I think, mystifying and confusing for some folks, and that’s folks who even cover this pretty closely, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League and so forth. Because it took a few years before they started to see that there was some new trends emerging, growing political violence. It was getting larger. The old profiles of who was doing the violent attacks were starting to widen. And in many ways that’s scarier and more dangerous than if they’re kind of narrow because we like our villains to be monsters who are far away from us and they couldn’t possibly be living next door to us. Whereas the closer they come, the more edgy it feels. So what you’re really experiencing there is the very beginning of where I date the beginning of our shift to the era of violent populism. We’re in a new world, but it’s a world on top of the old world. The old world didn’t go away. No, no, no. It feels like the old world is really the foundation that this new house of violence has been raised around. All of that that happened in the past was the foundation. And then in 2016, 2017, some people would say 2014, in that timeframe, the scaffolding began to go up and then Trump gets into office and then suddenly it’s a full-blown house that now all of America is living in. Well, if you look at the attacks on African-Americans, on Jews and Hispanics, except for going all the way back to the 1920 race time, except for that, these large-scale attacks have clustered since 2016. Then we have the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, that’s the largest attack killing, mass killing of Jews ever in the United States. And then we have August, 2019, the attack at the El Paso Walmart killing more Hispanics in a day than has ever been killed in our country. So there’s a pointed wave, if you see what I mean here. And race is certainly playing a role. So when you say how does this tie to the old layer or the existing layer, one of the big foundations here is absolutely race. What’s really sad and really tragic is in this new era of violent populism, that’s a term I like to use because it’s not just the same old, but it’s not quite civil war. In this new era, we’ve seen things move from the fringe where they were bad but happened more or less rarely, to more the mainstream where they’re happening more and more. And our surveys show this, people feel very fearful right now, and there’s actual reason for that. That’s not just media hype. There have been more events. We see them and they are real. We really have a time here that people are, I’m sorry to say, concerned. And there’s reason to be concerned. Yeah, as you say, the thing that pops up in my mind is the fact that white supremacy, which I think for a long time held sway over this country. And then I think that white supremacy in a lot of ways always held onto the power. But there was a time where being a racist was not cool and looked down upon. And so racism, while still evident, still holding people down, it’s built into institutions, all of that. I’m not saying that racism was away, I’m just saying that expressing it openly is now in the mainstream. I mean, we just heard President Trump recently talking about Somalis- Absolutely, yeah. In a very… I mean, just straight up, there is no difference between what he said about Somalis than what a Klansman in the forties in front of a burning cross would say about Black people, like zero difference. Yeah. So the reason I think we are in this new era, because I think you’re right, putting your finger on the mainstreaming of fringe ideas, which we used to think would stay under rocks and so forth, and white supremacy clearly fits that bill. But what I think is important to know is that we are transitioning for the first time in our country’s history from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy. And social changes like that in other countries around the world, so I’ve studied political violence for 30 years in many countries around the world. Big social changes like that Al, often create super issues with politics, make them more fragile and often lead to political violence. Now, what’s happening in our country is that we’ve been going through a demographic change for quite some time. America up through the 1960s was about 85% white as a country. There was ebbs and flows to be sure. Well, that really started to change bit by bit, drip by drip in the mid 1960s, whereas by 1990 we were 76% white as a country. Today we’re 57% white as a country. In about 10 or 15 years, it depends on mass deportations, and you can see why then that could be an issue, we will become truly a white minority democracy for the first time. And that is one of the big issues we see in our national surveys that helps to explain support for political violence on the right. Because what you’re seeing Al, is the more we are in what I call the tipping point generation for this big demographic shift, the more there are folks on the right, and most of them Trump supporters, mega supporters, who want to stop and actually reverse that shift. Then there of course, once knowing that, there are folks on the left, not everybody on the left, but some on the left that want to keep it going or actually accelerate it a bit for fear that with the mega crowd you won’t get it, the shift will stop altogether. These are major issues and things that really rock politics and then can lead to political violence. Talk to me a little bit about January 6th, when that happened, I’m sure you were watching it on TV. Yeah. What were you thinking as all of it was kind of coming into play? Well, so I was not quite as surprised as some folks, Al. So on October 5th in Chicago, I was on the Talking Head show in Chicago, it’s called Chicago Tonight. So on October 5th, 2020, that was just after the Trump debate where he said to the Proud Boys, stand back, but stand by. Well, the Chicago folks brought me on TV to talk about that, and I said that this was really quite concerning because this has echoes of things we’ve seen in Bosnia with some other leaders that a lot of Americans are just not familiar with, but are really quite worrisome. And I said what this meant was we had to be worried about the counting of the vote, not just ballot day, the day of voting. And we had to be worried about that all the way through January 6th, the certification of the election. But you made a point earlier, Al, about the importance of leaders. This is part of the reason why it’s hard to predict. It’s not a precise science, political violence. I like to use the idea, the analogy of a wildfire when I give talks. When we have wildfires, what we know as scientists is we can measure the size of the combustible material and we know with global warming, the combustible dry wood that could be set afire is getting larger. So you know you’re in wildfire season, but it’s not enough to predict a wildfire because the wildfire’s touched off by an unpredictable set of triggers, a lightning strike, a power line that came down unpredictably. Well, that is also a point about political leaders. So it was really, I did see some sign of this that Donald Trump said too about the Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. And no other president had said anything like that ever before in our history, let’s be clear. And because of my background studying political violence, I could compare that to some playbooks from other leaders in other parts of the world. That said, even I wouldn’t have said, oh yeah, we’re 90% likely to have an event, because who would’ve thought Donald Trump would’ve given the speech at the Ellipse, not just call people to it, it will be wild. His speech at the Ellipse, Al, made it wild. You co-authored a pretty remarkable study that looked at the political geography of January 6th insurrectionists. Can you break down the findings of that paper? Yeah. So one of the things we know when we study as a scholar of political violence, we look at things other people just don’t look at because they just don’t know what’s important. We want to know, where did those people live, where’d they come from? And when you have indictments and then you have the court process in the United States, you get that as a fact. So now it does mean I had to have big research teams. There’s a hundred thousand pages of court documents to go through. But nonetheless, you could actually find this out. And we found out something stunning, Al, and it’s one of the reasons I came back to that issue of demographic change in America. What we found is that first of all, over half of those who stormed the capitol, that 1,576 were doctors, lawyers, accountants, white collar jobs, business owners, flower shop owners, if you’ve been to Washington DC, Al, they stayed at the Willard. I have never stayed at the Willard- Yeah. So my University of Chicago doesn’t provide that benefit. That is crazy to me because I think the general knowledge or what you think is that most of the people that were there were middle class to lower, middle class to poor. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. Yeah, it’s really stunning, Al. So we made some snap judgments on that day in the media that have just stayed with us over and over and over again. So the first is their economic profile. Whoa, these are people with something to lose. Then where did they come from? Well, it turned out they came from all 50 states, but huge numbers from blue states like California and New York. And then we started to look at, well, where are in the states are they coming from? Half of them came from counties won by Joe Biden, blue counties. So then we got even deeper into it. And what’s happening, Al, is they’re coming from the suburbs around the big cities. They’re coming from the suburbs around Chicago, Elmhurst, Schomburg. They’re not coming from the rural parts of Illinois. They’re coming… That’s why we call them suburban rage. They’re coming from the most diversifying parts of America, the counties that are losing the largest share of white population. Back to that issue of population change, these are the people on the front lines of that demographic shift from America is a white majority democracy, to a white minority democracy. These are the counties that will impact where the leadership between Republican and Democrat have either just changed or are about to change. So they are right on the front lines of this demographic change and they are the folks with a lot to lose. And they showed up, some took private planes to get there. This is not the poor part, the white rural rage we’re so used to hearing about. This is well off suburban rage, and it’s important for us to know this, Al, because now we know this with definitiveness here. So it’s not like a hand-wavy guess. And it’s really important because it means you can get much more serious political violence than we’re used to thinking about. Yeah. So what happens, let’s say if circumstances remain as they are, IE, the economy is not doing great, the middle class is getting squeezed and ultimately getting smaller, right? The affordability thing is a real issue. What wins? The first big social change that’s feeding into our plight as a country is this demographic social change. There’s a second one, Al, which is that over the last 30 years, just as we’re having this demographic shift to a white minority democracy, we have been like a tidal wave flowing wealth to the top 1%. And we’ve been flowing wealth to the top 1% of both Republicans and Democrats. And that has been coming out of the bottom 90% of both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, both can be poorer and worse off. Whites can be worse off because of this shift of the wealth to the top 1%. And minorities can be worse off because of the shift. And you might say, well, wait a minute, maybe the American dream, we have social mobility. Well, sorry to say that at the same time, we’re shifting all this money to the top 1%, they’re spending that money to lock up and keep themselves to top 1%. It’s harder to get into that top 1% than it’s ever been in our society. And so what you see is, I just came back from Portland. What you see is a situation in Portland, which is a beautiful place, and wonderful place where ordinary people are constantly talking about how they’re feeling pinched and they’re working three jobs. Yeah. Just to make their middle, even lower middle class mortgages. I mean, this is what’s happening in America and why people have said, well, why does the establishment benefit me? Why shouldn’t I turn a blind eye if somebody’s going to attack the establishment viciously? Because it’s not working for a lot of folks, Al. And what I’m telling you is that you put these two together, you get this big demographic change happening, while you’re also getting a wealth shift like this and putting us in a negative sum society. Whoa, you really now have a cocktail where you’ve got a lot of people very angry, they’re not sure they want to have this shift and new people coming into power. And then on top of that, you have a lot of people that aren’t sure the system is worth saving. I really wanted to dive in on the polls that you’ve been conducting, and one of those, there seems to be a small but growing acceptance of political violence from both Democrats and Republicans. What do you think is driving that? I think these two social changes are underneath it, Al. So in our polls, just to put some numbers here, in 2025, we’ve done a survey in May and we did one in the end of September. So we do them every three or four months. We’ll do one in January I’m sure. And what we found is that on both sides of the political spectrum, high support for political violence. 30% in our most recent survey in September, 30% of Democrats support the use of force to prevent Trump from being president. 30%. 10% of Democrats think the death of Charlie Kirk is acceptable. His assassination was acceptable. These represent millions and millions of adults. That’s a lot of people, you see. What you’re saying is right, we’re seeing it. And I think what you’re really seeing here is as these two changes keep going, this era of violent populism is getting worse. Yeah, I mean, so I’ve seen that Democrats and Republicans are accusing each other of using violent rhetoric. So in your research, what’s actually more common in this modern area where we are right now, is it right wing or left wing on the violent rhetoric, but also who’s actually doing it? So we’ve had, just after the Kirk assassination, your listeners will probably remember and they can Google, we had these dueling studies come out almost instantly, because they’re kind of flash studies and they’re by think tanks in Washington DC. One basically saying there’s more right-wing violence than left. And one saying there’s more left-wing violence than right. Well, I just want your listeners to know that if you go under the hood, so my job is to be like the surgeon and really look at the data. You’re going to be stunned, maybe not so stunned, Al, because you live in the media, to learn the headlines and what’s actually in the content are very different. Both studies essentially have the same, similar findings, although slightly different numbers, which is they’re both going up. They’re both going up. So it’s really not the world that it was either always been one side or now it’s newly the other. So the Trump administration’s rhetoric, JD Vance is wrong to say it’s all coming from the left, but it’s also wrong to say it’s all coming from the right. Now, what I think you’re also seeing, Al, is that the politicians, if left to their own devices, rarely, I’m sorry to say do the right thing, they cater to their own constituents. But there’s some exceptions and they’ve been helpful, I think. There’s two exceptions I want to draw attention to, one who’s a Republican and one who’s a Democrat. On the Democratic side, the person who’s been just spectacular at trying to lower the temperature is Governor Shapiro. He’s a Democrat, the Governor of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro has given numerous interviews public, where he has condemned violence on all sides. He’s recognizing, as very few others are, that it’s a problem on both sides. He personally was almost burned to death, only minutes from being burned to death with his family here back in April. So he knows this personally about what’s at stake and he has done a great job, I think in recognizing that here. Now on the Republican side, we have Erika Kirk and what Erika Kirk, of course the wife of Charlie Kirk who was assassinated did, was at Kirk’s funeral, she forgave the shooter. But let’s just be clear, she’s a very powerful voice here. Now, I think we need more of those kind of voices, Al, because you see, they really are figures people pay attention to. They’re listening to people like that. They have personal skin in the game and they can speak with sort of a lens on this few others can. But we need more people to follow in that wake and I wish we had that, and that can actually help as we go forward. And I’m hoping they, both of those people will do more and more events, and others who have been the targets of political violence will come out and do exactly the same thing. I want to go back a little bit to January 6th and just talk about those insurrectionists. So when President Trump pardoned them, what was going through your mind? That it was probably going to be the worst thing that happened in the second Trump presidency. And I know I’m saying quite a bit. I know that he’s insulted every community under the sun many, many, many times. But the reason I’m so concerned about this, Al, is that there are many ways we could lose our democracy, but the most worrisome way is through political violence. You see, because the political violence is what would make the democratic backsliding you’re so used to hearing about, irreversible. And then how might that actually happen? You get people willing to fight for Trump. And already on January 6th, we collected all the public statements on their social media videos, et cetera, et cetera, in their trials about why those people did it. And the biggest reason they did it was Trump told them so, and they say this over and over and over again, I did it because Trump told me to do it. Well, now Trump has not forgiven them, he’s actually helping them. They may be suing the government to get millions of dollars in ‘restitution’. So this is going in a very bad way if you look at this in terms of thinking you’re going to deter people from fighting for Trump. And now of course others are going to know that as well on the other side. So again, this is a very dangerous move. Once he pardoned it, no president in history has ever pardoned people who use violence for him. Yeah. So you have the insurrectionist bucket. But there’s another bucket that I’ve been thinking about a lot and I haven’t heard a lot of people talk about this, and that is that under President Trump, ICE has expanded exponentially. Yep. The amount of money that they get in the budget is- Enormous. Enormous. I’ve never seen an agency ramp up, A, within a term, like so much money and so many people- It is about to become its own army. Right. And Al, what this means concretely is, we really don’t want any ICE agents in liberal cities in October, November, December. We don’t want to be in this world of predicting, well, Trump would never do X, he would never do Y. No, we’ve got real history now to know these are not good ways to think. What we just need to do is we need to recognize that when we have national elections that are actually going to determine the future of who governs our country, you want nothing like those agents who, many of them going to be very loyal to Trump, on the ground. We should already be saying, look, we want this to stop on October 1st to December 31st, 2026, and we want to have a clean separation, so there’s no issue here of intimidation. And why would you say that? It’s because even President Trump, do you really want to go down in history as having intimidated your way to victory? So I think we really need to talk about this as a country, Al. And we really want a clean break here in the three months that will be the election, the run-up to the election, the voting, and then the counting of the vote. In closing, one of the major themes of this conversation has been that America is changing into a white minority. The question that just keeps coming to mind to me is, as somebody who studies this, do you think that America can survive that transition? Well, I am going to argue, and I’m still a little nervous about it, but we are in for a medium, soft landing. Okay. One of the things we see is that every survey we’ve done, 70% to 80% of Americans abhor political violence. And that’s on both sides of the aisle. And I think in many ways there are saving grace and it’s why, Al, when we have public conversations about political violence, what we see in our surveys is that helps to take the temperature down. Because you might worry that, oh, we’ll talk about it, we’ll stir people up and they’ll go… It seems to be the other way around, Al, as best we can tell. That there’s 70% to 80% of the population that really, really doesn’t want to go down this road. They know intuitively this is just a bad idea. This is not going to be good for the country, for their goals. And so they are the anchor of optimism that I think is going to carry us to that medium soft landing here. I think we could help that more if we have some more politicians joining that anchor of optimism. They’re essentially giving voice to the 70%, 80%. And if you look at our no Kings protests, the number of people that have shown up and how peaceful they have been, how peaceful they have been, those are the 70% to 80%, Al. And I think that gives me a lot of hope for the future that we can navigate this peacefully. But again, I’m saying it’s a medium soft landing, doesn’t mean we’re getting off the hook without some more… I’m sorry to say, likely violence, yeah. Listen, I’ll take a medium. I would prefer not at all, but the way things are going, I’ll take the medium. Thank you very much. Bob, Professor Robert Pape, it has been such a delight talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out. Well, thank you Al, and thanks for such a thoughtful, great conversation about this. It’s just been wonderful. So thank you very much.

Democrats’ resounding victories in the New Jersey and Virginia governor’s races got most of the headlines, but the most dramatic results in last month’s elections were downballot. In Virginia, Democratic challengers flipped 13 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, to secure their largest majority in the chamber in four decades. New Jersey Democrats grew their margin in the assembly by five seats—winning their largest majority since Watergate. Coupled with the party’s string of upset victories and double-digit shifts in special elections last year, the results have some party leaders dreaming big.  How big? A new post-election analysis from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which supports Democratic candidates in statehouse races, argues that the current electoral climate presents the best chance in years for Democrats to consolidate power in blue states, flip battleground chambers, and loosen Republicans’ grip on power in solidly red states like South Carolina and Missouri. > “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform > legislative power.” By the group’s calculations, Democratic candidates over-performed the partisan leaning of their districts this fall by an average of 4.5 points—a shift that would put as many as 651 state legislative seats in play across the country in a midterm election year, and position the party for a bit of long-awaited payback.  “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally transform legislative power,” said DLCC president Heather Williams. While the November results have many Democrats talking enthusiastically about a repeat of the 2018 blue wave, Williams goes back further: “We are looking at the makings of an environment that looks more like 2010 in reverse.” That year, powered by fallout from the Great Recession and the tea party wave, and assisted by tens of millions of dollars in spending down the stretch, Republicans picked up nearly 700 seats and flipped 22 state legislative chambers. Because those legislatures would go on to control the decennial redistricting process, Republicans were able to not just seize power, but hold onto it for a decade—or longer. The stakes for redistricting this time around are not as clear-cut, but still very much real. For the time being, thanks to Texas’ decision to redraw its maps at President Donald Trump’s request, and California’s own retaliatory effort, every legislative session is a potential redistricting session. In response to Republican efforts earlier this year, the DLCC pushed for Democrats to “go on offense” on redistricting in states they control. “At the end of the day, it is state legislators who are drawing these maps,” Williams says. “This mid-cycle process has both put a spotlight on that, but it’s also sort of clarified the fact that the way that you prevent this from happening in the future—or the way that you get Democrats in this room to have this conversation—is you elect them first.” When I last spoke with Williams, in 2024, the DLCC’s map looked quite a bit different. That year, facing the same headwinds that doomed Democrats at all levels, the organization went into the fall hoping to flip five legislative chambers but ultimately picked up none and—with the exception of an unsuccessful effort to break a Republican supermajority in Kansas—largely confined its efforts to presidential battleground states. This time around, it’s aiming to compete in 41 chambers in 27 states. That includes efforts to break Republican supermajorities in both chambers of the Florida and Missouri legislatures; the Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio, and South Carolina houses; and the North Carolina senate (where Republicans have been able to override some of Democratic Gov. Josh Stein’s vetoes). In November, Democrats already succeeded in breaking Republicans’ supermajority in the Mississippi Senate, after a court struck down the existing legislative maps for violating the Voting Rights Act. The goal, Williams says, is to get more state parties out of the “superminority” status and “into a place where you are at least in the negotiating room.” “Democrats in the states lost a lot of ground in 2010 and in the couple of elections after that, and in that rebuild process, the map changed a lot,” Williams says. “What we are saying in this update to the target map—and frankly, our broader strategy—is that we must show up in these red states. When you think about the long term trajectory of Democrats and our success as a party, we need to recognize these moments of power, and these states where Republicans have been competing, and we need to show up for voters.” But there are also a lot of chambers up for grabs. Part of what makes the map so encouraging for Democrats, Williams argues, is how thin the line currently is between conservative governance and Democratic rule. “Flipping just 19 seats on this map could establish four new Democratic trifectas and six new Democratic majorities,” she said. “The path there is not complicated—it’s really crystal clear.” The DLCC has its eyes on potential governing trifectas in Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin. And the group sees potential for new Democratic supermajorities in 10 chambers across eight states—both chambers of the legislature in Colorado and Vermont; the lower levels of the legislature in Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, and Washington; and the senate in New York; Oregon; and Washington. In at least one way, though, this will be nothing like the tea party wave. This year, the DLCC is aiming to spend $50 million on its national effort in 2026—which the group is billing as the its largest-ever single-year sum. When Republicans swept the table in 2010, the DLCC spent just $10 million.

Timothy Rodriguez has lived in New York all his life. But the notion of a Muslim mayor never entered the realm of possibility for him. That changed Tuesday when Zohran Mamdani’s victory made him New York’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor-elect. “It’s a big win for New York City, of course, it’s a big win for Muslims,” Rodriguez, 35, told me after news of Mamdani’s win broke on Tuesday night. “I’m happy to see change and that these things are possible.” I first met Timothy a few hours earlier, in downtown Brooklyn, outside the Al-Farooq Mosque. It sits on a block of Atlantic Avenue, home to two Middle Eastern grocery stores and shops selling goods such as spices, Islamic decorative arts, and clothing. When we spoke, he and his sister, Ally, 33, had just wrapped up the Asr prayer, one of the five daily prayers for observant Muslims. Neither had voted yet, but they both hoped to see Mamdani elected.  “A lot of Muslims don’t feel like they have a place here,” Timothy said. He hopes that, like former President Barack Obama, Mamdani can “inspire” other Muslim New Yorkers to run for office and help “break the stigma that Muslims aren’t good people.” The siblings cited Mamdani’s relentless focus on affordability for their support. “Prices are high, rent is high,” Timothy said. “ “Especially food,” Ally chimed in, her young daughter hoisted on her hip. The fact that Mamdani is also Muslim, she said, was merely “a bonus.”  Throughout his historic campaign, Mamdani has been outspoken about his faith. According to the New York Times, the 34-year-old democratic socialist visited more than 50 mosques on the campaign trail, with members of his campaign visiting nearly 200. Mamdani has also addressed Islamophobia head-on, in visits to city mosques and online, detailing his and his family members’ experiences with racist attacks after former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo laughed at a conservative radio host’s suggestion that Mamdani would be “cheering” in the event of another 9/11. “That’s another problem,” Cuomo added. (Cuomo later rejected allegations of Islamophobia, claiming that Mamdani was trying to “divide people” by making an issue out of the radio exchange.) But the comments by Cuomo were only the latest in a series of escalating attacks, which started in earnest on the night of Mamdani’s primary upset back in June. As I wrote at the time:  > Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Donald Trump Jr., Laura Loomer, and Charlie Kirk > were among the right-wingers who fired off Islamophobic smears about Mamdani > and Muslim New Yorkers to their millions of followers after Cuomo’s surprising > concession. The posts come days after reports that Mamdani has faced threats > and attacks prompting an investigation by the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force. Since then, others have piled on. Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa baselessly accused Mamdani of supporting a “global jihad.” Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams also decried the rise of “Islamic extremism” in Europe. Even on Tuesday, as New Yorkers headed to the polls, NBC News reported that a pro-Cuomo super PAC was running a last-minute ad depicting Mamdani in front of the Twin Towers on 9/11, accompanied by a quote from leftie streamer Hasan Piker, saying “America deserved 9/11.” (The Cuomo campaign has sought to tie Mamdani to those comments, even after Mamdani disavowed them as “objectionable and reprehensible.”) “What a lot of this anti-Muslim rhetoric and Islamophobia has done for a lot of people in the city is that people feel like they have their Muslim identity on the sidelines,” Saman Waquad, president of the Muslim Democratic Club, of which Mamdani is a member, told me. Though Waquad said that the racist attacks “put a target on all of our backs,” she was encouraged by Mamdani’s decision to stand proud in his identity as a Muslim New Yorker. “When we see Zohran show up as a Muslim and not shy away, it gives people more courage to come out for him,” she added. “In many ways, he’s one of us.” Noting that the city is home to an estimated one million Muslims, Waquad added: “That’s a lot of folks that are going to feel seen.” Tazul Islam, a 40-year-old office manager from Queens, whom I also met outside the Al-Farooq Mosque on Tuesday afternoon, told me he hopes Mamdani remains proud of his faith once he is officially sworn in as mayor.  “Hopefully, he can fix some of the misunderstandings and myths about the religion,” Islam said. The faith, he added, “has a lot more to do with making the world a more beautiful place than the scare tactics we hear.” 

Despite years of voter suppression efforts by the state’s Republican Party, Virginians have spoken: It’s time for GOP gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears to “go somewhere and sit down.” Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who represented the state’s 7th District in Congress until this year, defeated Earle-Sears in a highly anticipated race to become the first female governor in the Commonwealth’s centuries-long history. > VA Voter: Spanberger. She out there doing what she's supposed to do. That > other lady? She needs to go somewhere and sit down. pic.twitter.com/72dNcvPWCT > > — Acyn (@Acyn) November 4, 2025 Spanberger beat Earle-Sears by a staggering 12-point margin with close to 80 percent of votes counted, according to Associated Press projections. The 56-44 win—representing well over 300,000 votes—comes at a precarious time for the Democratic Party, with Virginia serving as a critical bellwether for the country’s feelings on President Donald Trump before national midterm elections next year. For years, Virginia Republicans have been working overtime to suppress the state’s Democratic voters, including a blatantly illegal voter roll purge in 2023 orchestrated by then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin. In 2024, the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc ruled in Youngkin’s favor, forcing nearly 1,600 voters to fight for their registration to be reinstated. A year later, shortly after Trump’s re-election, the Justice Department voluntarily dismissed a lawsuit originally brought forth by the Biden administration that once again challenged the purge. Spanberger’s victory is a promising sign for Virginia’s effort, alongside other Democratic-led legislatures, to redraw district lines after states like North Carolina and Texas were subjected to extreme gerrymandering by Republican legislators that functionally disenfranchised a huge swath of their voters. Alongside the governorship, all 100 seats in Virginia’s House of Delegates, the lower chamber of its state legislature, are also up for reelection—which will determine the GOP’s chances of leaving Democratic redistricting dead in the water.

In a wide-ranging Sunday night interview on CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” President Donald Trump put his desire for unchecked power on full display. He bragged to correspondent Norah O’Donnell that, thanks to the Insurrection Act of 1792, he can invade your city whenever he wants. He said immigration raids—including acts of police violence such as using tear gas in residential neighborhoods, throwing people to the ground, and breaking car windows—”haven’t gone far enough.” And he said the government shutdown will last until Democrats in Congress bend to his will—or until Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) agrees to eliminate the filibuster, which Thune, so far, has rejected. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from Trump’s comments on domestic policy: Trump blamed the shutdown on the Democrats As the federal government shutdown enters its fifth week—on pace to be the second-longest in history after the one that stretched from December 2018 into January 2019—O’Donnell had a straightforward question for Trump: “What are you doing as president to end the shutdown?” His answer? Blaming the Democrats. “The Republicans are voting almost unanimously to end it, and the Democrats keep voting against ending it,” Trump said. “They’ve lost their way,” he added. “They become crazed lunatics.” Senate Democrats have said they will vote to reopen the government if the legislation includes an extension of Obamacare subsidies; without those, the health policy think tank KFF has estimated, average monthly premiums on people who get their insurance through the ACA marketplace would more than double. Trump also claimed Obamacare is “terrible,” adding, “We can make it much less expensive for people and give them much better health care.” But, yet again, he failed to outline his alternative. (Remember his “concepts of a plan“?) > What is President Trump doing to end the government shutdown? > > “What we're doing is we keep voting. I mean, the Republicans are voting almost > unanimously to end, and the Democrats keep voting against ending it,” says > Trump. pic.twitter.com/f6smwqi8Jn > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 3, 2025 He defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s violent tactics Citing videos of ICE officers tackling a mother in court, using tear gas in a residential neighborhood in Chicago, and smashing car windows, O’Donnell asked Trump if some of the raids have “gone too far?” Trump gave what may have been his most direct answer of the interview: “No, I think they haven’t gone far enough,” he said. “We’ve been held back by the judges, by the liberal judges that were put in [the federal courts] by Biden and by Obama.” “You’re okay with those tactics?” O’Donnell pressed. “Yeah, because you have to get the people out,” he replied. > "I think they haven't gone far enough," says President Trump, defending ICE > raids. In one case, ICE tackled a young mother and in another tear gas was > used in a residential neighborhood. pic.twitter.com/b7tEYqWyUv > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 2, 2025 He bragged that he can send the military into any city, at any time O’Donnell asked Trump what he meant when, at a speech in Japan last week, he said: “If we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard.” Trump has already sent guard troops into Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; Chicago; and Memphis, Tenn. Trump seemed delighted to remind O’Donnell and viewers of what he sees as his vast power: “Well, if you had to send in the Army, or if you had to send in the Marines, I’d do that in a heartbeat. You know you have a thing called the Insurrection Act. You know that, right? Do you know that I could use that immediately, and no judge can even challenge you on that. But I haven’t chosen to do it because I haven’t felt we need it.” > “If you had to send in the Army or if you had to send in the Marines, I'd do > that in a heartbeat,” says President Trump. He has ordered the National Guard > to five major U.S. cities. https://t.co/GAtK4KJNAf pic.twitter.com/Yx0SoiGDFQ > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 3, 2025 This is not the first time Trump has threatened to use the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to override federal law that prohibits the military from acting as law enforcement, in order to “suppress rebellion.” But the law has not been used in more than three decades and is widely seen by legal experts as having a frightening potential for abuse. “So you’re going to send the military into American cities?” O’Donnell pressed. “Well, if I wanted to, I could, if I want to use the Insurrection Act,” Trump responded. “The Insurrection Act has been used routinely by presidents, and if I needed it, that would mean I could bring in the Army, the Marines, I could bring in whoever I want, but I haven’t chosen to use it. I hope you give me credit for that.” He claimed he has been “mild-mannered” when it comes to political retribution In only nine months, Trump has made good on his long-running promise to prosecute his political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. “There’s a pattern to these names. They’re all public figures who have publicly denounced you. Is it political retribution?” O’Donnell asked. Trump promptly played the victim: “You know who got indicted? The man you’re looking at,” he replied. “I got indicted and I was innocent, and here I am, because I was able to beat all of the nonsense that was thrown at me.” (He was, indeed, found guilty in New York last year on 34 felony counts in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case.) > “I think I've been very mild-mannered. You're looking at a man who was > indicted many times, and I had to beat the rap,” says President Trump after > the recent indictments of high-profile figures who have publicly denounced > him. https://t.co/XHoIr77Eh1 pic.twitter.com/tLH0fxW2wI > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 3, 2025 Despite posting a Truth Social message in September demanding that Attorney General Pam Bondi speed up the prosecutions, just days before Comey was indicted and a couple weeks before Bolton and James were, Trump insisted he did not instruct the Department of Justice to pursue them. “No, you don’t have to instruct them, because they were so dirty, they were so crooked, they were so corrupt,” he said, proceeding to praise the work of Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel. “I think I’ve been very mild-mannered,” Trump continued. “You’re looking at a man who was indicted many times, and I had to beat the rap, otherwise I couldn’t have run for president.” He think he’s “better looking” than Zohran Mamdani Trump insisted that the frontrunner in New York City’s Tuesday mayoral election, 34-year-old self-described Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, is a “Communist.” When O’Donnell asked Trump what he makes of comparisons between himself and Mamdani—”charismatic, breaking the old rules,” as O’Donnell put it—Trump replied: “I think I’m a much better-looking person than him.” He then reiterated his threat to withhold federal funding from his home city if Mamdani wins over ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. “It’s going to be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York, because if you have a Communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump said. He claimed that he is “not a fan of Cuomo one way or the other,” but added, “If it’s going to be between a bad Democrat and a Communist, I’m going to pick the bad Democrat all the time, to be honest with you.” > Some have called Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic socialist front-runner for New > York City mayor, a left-wing version of President Trump. > > "I think I'm a much better looking person than him," says Trump, after calling > Mamdani a "communist." pic.twitter.com/p9FDWNcoGs > > — 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) November 2, 2025

Zohran Mamdani hadn’t been Regina Weiss’ first choice for mayor of New York City. She’d ranked city comptroller Brad Lander number-one on her primary ballot in June, and told me she wished that the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist state assemblymember brought a bit more experience to the job. But Weiss, who volunteers with Indivisible, was happily supporting the Democratic nominee now, and expected to begin canvassing for him soon. What she couldn’t understand, she told me, as she waited for the candidate to take the stage with Sen. Bernie Sanders at the “Fighting Oligarchy” town hall in Brooklyn on Saturday, was why some of the biggest names in her party weren’t doing the same. “I’ve never seen this before—I’ve never seen the Democratic leadership not endorse the Democratic candidate,” she said. “It’s so ugly, it’s so cowardly, it’s so stupid. The Democrats are basically in the crapper when it comes to enthusiasm. You’ve got this guy—the Democratic candidate for the biggest city in the country—and they’re not endorsing him.”  > “One might think—one might think!—that if a candidate starting at 2 percent in > the polls, gets 50,000 volunteers, creates enormous excitement, gets young > people involved in the political process, gets non-traditional voters to vote, > Democratic leaders will be jumping up and down! ‘This is our guy!’” Weiss put her hands to her face in frustration. She’d been reading happily before I came along. “Sorry, I’m very angry about this,” she said. “What is it? Is it like they’re afraid? I mean, I guess they’re afraid, but my God!” Two months out from one of the biggest elections since Trump won the presidency, most Democratic voters in New York City are on board with their party’s nominee. After defeating disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo by double digits in the primary, Mamdani leads him comfortably again in four-way general-election polls. Scandal-plagued mayor Eric Adams and Republican Curtis Sliwa are barely visible in the distance. Mamdani has raised the maximum amount allowable under the city’s matching-funds system, maintained a relentless schedule of campaign appearances and media hits, and even talked privately with Barack Obama. His support among elected officials is real. Four members of the city’s congressional delegation have publicly endorsed him—including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom he’d appeared a few hours before the town hall. Along the side wall of the packed auditorium at Brooklyn College, city council members and state legislators milled about, mingling with Mamdani’s top advisors and the omnipresent former Rep. Jamaal Bowman (who has cut an ad for the candidate, brought Mamdani to a Wu-Tang show, and co-hosted a community event for him in the South Bronx). But it was hard to ignore who hadn’t gotten on board. Even as Trump threatened to unleash hell on New York City, and the president dangled an ambassadorship to lure Adams out of the race, some of the most powerful Democrats in the city and the state have been deafeningly quiet. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who helped force Cuomo’s resignation as governor, is publicly agnostic on whether Mamdani or Cuomo should run America’s largest city. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, after previously avoiding questions about the race by insisting that he does not endorse in primaries, has still not made an endorsement more than two months after the primary. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries has thus far avoided backing Mamdani while egging on criticisms of his housing policy. Reps. Dan Goldman and Ritchie Torres, junior Democrats with outsized national profiles, have withheld thei support, while suggesting that the nominee has not done enough to condemn anti-semitism. That Rep. Tom Suozzi, whose Long Island district includes parts of Queens, told a TV interviewer Mamdani should leave the party is not so surprising. That Rep. Greg Meeks—the chair of the Queens Democratic Party—is still holding out is a bit more glaring. For the party’s left-wing, often accused by more moderate factions of hampering Democrats’ big-tent efforts, Mamdani’s nomination poses an obvious question: What kind of “big tent” party doesn’t have room for the party’s own candidate and the majority of its voters?  As Ocasio-Cortez recently put it, “Are we a party that rallies behind our nominee, or not?” For the most part, the rally at Brooklyn College, a brisk walk away from Sanders’ childhood home in Midwood, was an upbeat affair. Sanders has been holding these “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies since February, and in always-unsaid ways they’ve sometimes felt like a passing of the torch. Mamdani told the crowd about gathering signatures for his first assembly campaign outside a Sanders rally in 2019, and of building out a volunteer base by inviting people to the senator’s debate watch parties. He spoke in some detail about Sanders’ tenure as mayor of Burlington, Vermont—evidence that a socialist can run a city pretty well, but also, that a socialist running a city still feels pretty banal much of the time. (He “took on a broken property tax system,” Mamdani said, and worked “to transform the Lake Champlain waterfront.”) A few protestors tried to spoil the fun, but never to much effect. At one point, a man with a Cuban flag on his shirt stood up to call the candidate a communist.  “Brother, I’m here with another Democratic Socialist,” said a smiling Mamdani, referring to Sanders. But the lack of support from high-ranking Democrats was an unavoidable topic. During the Q&A portion of the event, a guy from Canarsie stood up to express his fear that history was repeating. “I just look at this campaign and it reminds me a little bit of what happened a few years ago in Buffalo,” he said.  The man was referring to that city’s 2021 mayoral election, when India Walton, a 29-year-old nurse, defeated the incumbent mayor in the primary—only to lose to the same candidate in the general election. Billionaire donors’ support for Cuomo, and the party’s tepid response, was giving him “deja vu.” “How do we make sure that something like like this doesn’t happen again?” he asked.  Mamdani’s response was fairly diplomatic. “We have to beat Andrew Cuomo one more time,” he said, because, “This is a man who does not understand that no means no.” He urged the crowd to continue volunteering and organizing. But Sanders sounded like he had been waiting for something like this. And like Weiss, the woman I spoke with before the town hall, he was fired up. “I want to, if I might—I want to add a point to that very good question,” he said, standing up from his chair and walking toward the front of the stage. “It may be a little bit out of place here, but I want to do it. I find it a little bit strange that when we have a candidate who competed very hard, as did a number of other people in the Democratic primary—”  He turned to Mamdani.  “My understanding is you won that primary. Is that correct?,” Sanders asked. Mamdani nodded.  “My understanding is you are the Democratic Party candidate for mayor of the city of New York. Is that correct?” Mamdani nodded again.  “Now, apropos that question: I find it hard to understand how the major Democratic leaders in New York State are not supporting the Democratic candidate,” Sanders continued. “One might think—one might think!—that if a candidate starting at 2 percent in the polls, gets 50,000 volunteers, creates enormous excitement, gets young people involved in the political process, gets non-traditional voters to vote, Democratic leaders would be jumping up and down! ‘This is our guy!’” The senator seemed to be saying what everyone else was thinking. The response from the crowd was surpassed, perhaps, only by Sanders’ earlier condemnation of American weapons sales in Israel. And the two sentiments are not really unrelated—in the case of both Israel and Mamdani, high-profile Democrats are substantially out of step with Democratic voters, and well-funded attempts to weaponize Mamdani’s criticism of Israel in the primary only served to underscore the qualities that made him appealing to voters. That moment, and the two Democratic Socialists’ presence on stage together, was a reminder of both how much and how little had changed since I’d last checked in on the Fighting Oligarchy Tour last spring. At the time, it felt like a post-election low. While elected Democrats had, individually and in small groups, sought to demonstrate their opposition to Trump and Elon Musk’s rampage through Washington, the party had little to show from those first few months. Senate Democrats had just caved to approve a Republican funding measure and avert a government shutdown. Purportedly ambitious figures seemed to prefer litigating wokeness to putting out the fire in their house. And Democratic voters were watching this and going, what the hell? Covering Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez for two stops in Arizona, I had been struck by just how un-Bernie-like the crowds were; the normie Democrats were showing support for the Democratic Socialists, because the Democratic Socialists were showing up for them when so many powerful people and institutions were not. Fast forward to today, and the party’s leaders in Washington seem ready to cave on another shutdown fight this month. A lot of people still sound more comfortable complaining about trans rights than fascism. It’s not too simplistic to say that the leadership that can’t unite behind Mamdani now is the leadership that made Mamdani possible—a cynical and bloodless and compromised liberalism that’s hovering tentatively by the focus groups while real popular movements takes shape on their own. Sanders started holding these events, he explained earlier this year, because to his surprise, no one else was. For Trump’s opponents, this shift toward autocracy represents both a challenge and an opportunity—one that Sanders has laid the foundation for, and Mamdani and his movement have now seized. When no one else is coming to save you, you have to save yourselves.

Conspiracy theorist and self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer continues to wield a jarring amount of power in the Trump administration. The latest example: She appears to have had a Democratic Senator’s classified visit to a military spy agency cancelled. On Wednesday, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that his visit to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA)’s Virginia headquarters had been cancelled after Loomer launched what Warner called “a campaign of baseless attacks” on social media against him and the NGA’s Director, Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, who is also known as “Trey.” The classified visit, planned for Friday, had not been publicized. It was intended to be an oversight visit to the agency, which works within the Department of Defense (DOD) to provide intelligence through maps and satellites. But in a series of X posts on Sunday, Loomer called Warner a “Russia Hoaxer” and alleged the NGA “is infested with Trump haters” because Whitworth was appointed under former President Joe Biden. “Why are the Pentagon and [intelligence community] allowing for the Director of an Intel agency to host a rabid ANTI-TRUMP DEMOCRAT SENATOR at NGA under the Trump administration?” Loomer asked. On X, Warner said that Loomer “is basically a Cabinet member at this point.” And in a YouTube video discussing the news, Warner said it appears that Loomer “actually has more power and sway than [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth or [National Intelligence Director] Tulsi Gabbard.” Then he ticked off several recent examples of Loomer’s apparent power in the defense and intelligence sectors. After an Oval Office meeting earlier this year in which Loomer alleged some members of the National Security Council were disloyal to Trump, the president fired six of them. In May, she claimed credit for Trump’s firing of National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. Warner also said Loomer also appears to have had a role in Trump revoking the national security clearances of 37 current and former officials last month, and in the firing of the Defense Intelligence Agency Director Jeffrey Kruse. Spokespeople for the White House and Defense Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Mother Jones. Loomer told the New York Times that she learned of the classified meeting from someone inside the intelligence community, and claimed that Warner should “be removed from office and tried for treason.” On X, she said that Whitworth should be fired. In a meeting with reporters on Wednesday, Warner said Loomer’s influence “is the kind of thing that happens in authoritarian regimes,” according to the New York Times. “You purge your independent intelligence community and make them loyal not to a constitution but something else.” Warner also told the Times he is concerned about what the cancellation of the visit means for congressional oversight. “Is congressional oversight dead?” he asked. “If we are not doing oversight, if the intelligence is potentially being cooked or being bent to meet the administration’s needs, and we end up in a conflict—the American people have the right to say, ‘How the hell did this happen?'” Several Democrat members of Congress have reported being denied oversight visits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in recent months. When you consider Loomer’s politics, her sway in the White House seems even more jarring. And as former Mother Jones reporter Ali Breland explained in a piece when Loomer lost her 2022 congressional primary in Florida, her politics pretty much boil down to one word: Racism. > She has a years-long history of raw, unfiltered Islamophobia that possibly > reached its zenith when she said, after 50 people were killed in a New Zealand > mosque, that: “Nobody cares about [the] Christchurch [shooting]. I especially > don’t. I care about my social media accounts and the fact that Americans are > being silenced.” (Loomer was bemoaning those kicked off websites like Twitter > for being racist.) > > > > She did not change her rhetoric to make herself more palatable for Congress > during the campaign. Loomer recently shared an article that lamented the > “accelerating” of the “erasing” of “America’s white history.”  She’s also kept > up a public dialogue with Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, who endorsed her. > In March, Loomer went on white nationalist Jared Taylor’s podcast. Right Wing > Watch has documented her saying things like “I’m a really big supporter of the > Christian nationalist movement,” and “I’m going to fight for Christians, I’m > going to fight for white people, I’m going to fight for nationalist > movements.” Despite—or maybe because of—this, Loomer’s influence continues to grow. As I reported last month, Loomer managed to convince the State Department to halt visitor visas to people from Gaza, including humanitarian medical visas for injured children. This weekend, when she wasn’t trashing Warner or Whitworth on X, she celebrated a new development: The State Department went further, suspending almost all visitor visas for Palestinian passport holders, as she had called for. “Thank you, @SecRubio!” Loomer wrote.

The Voting Rights Act turned 60 years old this month. It’s a landmark piece of legislation designed to enforce voting rights protected by the Constitution, especially for Black Americans in Southern states with a history of suppressing racial minorities from voting. The act is considered one of the most effective laws ever passed to protect voting rights. Today, it’s a shell of itself. Jamelle Bouie, a political columnist for The New York Times, often analyzes today’s political stories through the lens of a historian. He’s written about why the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision to exclude African Americans from becoming citizens still matters today and how the Trump administration’s war on the federal government is similar to the Iraq War’s “shock and awe” campaign. And he’s recently taken on the conservative movement’s successful effort to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. “The notion that everyone deserves equal access to the ballot, that everyone deserves equal access to elections, that one person ought to mean one vote, and that there ought to be some measure of political equality has never really sat well with the political right in this country,” Bouie says. On this week’s More To The Story, Bouie sits down with host Al Letson to talk about how the Voting Rights Act has been defanged by the Supreme Court, why the Democratic Party is made up of “a bunch of weenies,” and why he believes the country is now in a constitutional emergency. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Al Letson: So this month marks the 60th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act being signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The Supreme Court seems to be dismantling it bit by bit. Tell me a little bit about the history of the act and how it’s changed over the years. Jamelle Bouie: The Voting Rights Act is more or less drafted and passed and signed in the first half, more or less of 1965. It’s signed into law August 6th, 1965. Much of the work is done earlier in the year. And anyone who’s seen the movie Selma, who knows sort of basic civil rights chronology, knows that it was prompted, precipitated by movement efforts to demonstrate the high barriers to voting that still existed post 1964 Civil Rights Act. And the signature piece of it, the piece of it that really made it transformative was section five, which is called pre-clearance. And pre-clearance simply meant that in jurisdictions covered by the law, if they wanted to change their voting rules, they had to go to the Justice Department, submit them and get approval. That’s it. But in practice it meant that lots of localities and municipalities and states that were looking for ways to dilute or otherwise undermine the voting power of black residents simply couldn’t because the federal government was maintaining kind of a sharp and watchful eye over their conduct. And in the 2013 case, Shelby County Beholder, the Supreme Court basically gutted pre-clearance. Specifically the court said that the existing pre-clearance formula, which was based off of states that had histories of voting discrimination, was outdated. John Roberts essentially is saying, the chief justice, he wrote the opinion for the court. Roberts saying that, “Times have changed. It’s unfair to hold these states to account for actions taken in a previous generation.” So in theory, a Congress could pass a new voting rights bill with a different formula for pre-clearance. You could have universal pre-clearance, which is something I would prefer, where all states had to submit voting plans prior to enactment, to make sure they’re not discriminating. But in practice, Congress just has not had a voting majority for any kind of serious voting rights bill. And so the Roberts Court decision and pre-clearance, and subsequent decisions from the court have weakened the law in other ways. So in 2021, for example, in a decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court held that you needed to prove intent to discriminate in order to file suit under section two, which gives sort of a cause of action. You can sue under section two for voting discrimination. And proving intent is so hard, the evidence of it you can see and clearly point to, but proving intent, I mean that’s a tough bar to reach. That’s what made the decision in 2021 so absurd, because even at the height of voting discrimination in this country, lawmakers were smart enough not to say, “We’re doing this to discriminate against Black people or Hispanic people or whomever.” The 15th Amendment still exists. It explicitly bars discrimination in voting on race. And so obviously lawmakers figured out ways to get around it. And so to prove intent, it’s impossible. I think people that are watching the way politics are playing out right now, especially if you’re not a student of history, you may not realize that all of these movements, everything that we’re seeing right now has been in the works for a very long time. Like Chief Justice Roberts hasn’t liked the Voting Rights Act since he was a young man working under Chief Justice William Rehnquist. So this is sort of fulfillment of a promise that was made many years ago, to shift society into this new place or maybe more accurately, to shift society back to an old place. I think that’s right. I mean, Roberts has a long history of disliking the Voting Rights Act, but in general, the conservative movement has never liked the Voting Rights Act. It’s never liked the idea of a federal government exercising its authority in strong ways to curb states from shaping their electorates and shaping their elections. The notion that everyone deserves equal access to the ballot, that everyone deserves equal access to elections, that one person ought to mean one vote, and that there ought to be some measure of political equality has never really sat well with the political right in this country. And with the Trump administration and with the Supreme Court, they are very clearly aiming to use this power to advance their vision of some people have more access than others. So do you feel like we are in a constitutional crisis? I mean, yeah, I’m very much of the view that we’re in some kind of constitutional emergency, whether you want to call it a constitutional crisis, whether you want to describe it as an ongoing assault on the constitutional structure, the term I like a lot, whether you want to see it as an acute instance of constitutional rot, the foundation is rotting under our feet, however you want to describe it, right? There’s different ways to talk about this. I think it’s clearly true that we’re in a state of constitutional emergency. So I want to step back a little bit and just look at the Democratic Party. I’m curious if the struggles that you’re seeing right now, like what’s going on with the Voting Act, but also when we look at taking away women’s rights to choose, in red states, I’m curious if you think that the Democratic Party has just been a little bit too meek in the past and not been able to codify these things. I’ve heard many people say that the argument over Roe V. Wade, we didn’t even need to have that. It could have been codified to stop this from happening, but the Democrats never did it. I don’t know, what’s your thoughts on that? I think you could fault the Democrats probably rightfully for not codifying Roe V. Wade when they had the chance, although it’s worth saying that probably the first time there was an actual voting majority, like a pro-choice voting majority in Congress was the most recent democratic trifecta, that people who remember the 2009 to 2011 cycle may recall that part of what almost killed the Affordable Care Act were pro-life Democrats who were demanded a promise that there would not be any funding for abortion in the law. During the time when there was briefly a Democratic super majority, a chunk of that super majority constituted Democrats who probably would not vote to codify Roe V. Wade. So just for saying that. But the reason conservatives are anti-abortion isn’t because liberals support choice, they’re anti-abortion because they have a sincere belief that one should not be able to get a legal abortion. And I think it’s worth remembering that the other side gets a vote, right? The other side has agency, they don’t do things purely in reaction to their opponents, but they have an independent source of motivation. Now having said that, do I think that the Democratic Party is a bunch of weenies? I do. Do I think that Democrats could use more fight in them? I absolutely do. I know you know this, but listeners who maybe have not watched The Wire or rewatched The Wire may not remember, I believe it’s a scene in season four, when the character Marlowe Stanfield goes into a convenience store and steals a lollipop just because he can. And there’s a security guard there who sees him steal it and is like, “Hey man, could you just do me a solid and put it back, because I know you’re just kind of disrespecting me to disrespect me, but I have no choice, I have this job. This is what I do and you know I just can’t let you leave having stolen something.” And Marlowe, who is kind of like a murderer psychopath, and a powerful on the rise drug kingpin, looks at him and says to him, “You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.” And I think about that all the time with relation to Democrats. I think so many elected Democrats who are of a generation of lawmakers who came of age on the oldest side in the seventies, in the eighties and the nineties, in a period where even when the country’s politics were headed towards stark polarization, that would’ve been the nineties. There are still moderate Republicans, there are still conservative Democrats. There’s still kind of a bipartisan ethos in Washington. And there’s still the sense in their political upbringing that you could calm the common ground with your opponents, that you kind of basically wanted the same things, just had different ways of going about it. And there was a sense as well that the country was generally kind of conservative, and so you just had to work around that. And so Democrats of that ilk, of that generation, I think are just dispositionally inclined to behave as if their Republican counterparts are operating in good faith, as if they don’t really mean the extreme things they say. And I think this belief is downstream of this view that kind of we’re all playing a game, but that’s not how it is. They want it to be one way, but it’s the other way. And the other way is that, “No, Republicans want to destroy you.” The Republican Party is out to win and win for the duration. To your point, I think that many Democrats, including the current Democratic leadership, and when I say leadership, I’m talking about Chuck Schumer, they want to go back or they wholeheartedly believe that we are still living in the world of Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan, and I’m curious if you agree with this, the Democrats are very much entrenched in the idea of, whose turn is it? Instead of like, who’s got the sharpest blade? So they will push forward a candidate that they feel like, “Well, it’s their turn,” instead of the candidate that really has a blade that’s sharp and can go in and cut, and Republicans are the exact opposite. So I do agree with this. I think that Hakeem Jeffries knows that we’re not in the era of Reagan and Tip O’Neill, but I think what we’re sensing from democratic leadership is that they imagine themselves in the face of this chaotic president and this transgressive political movement, they imagine themselves as the protector of the system. They’re defending the way things used to be so they can be restored. Unfortunately, this just reads as being weak and there’s no going back. What it means is that you can’t do a game of seniority anymore. I think of the minor in the scheme of things, but revealing, the fight over who is going to be the ranking member in the House Oversight Committee. Initially Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was running for that spot and her opponent was Jerry Connolly. Now Ocasio-Cortez, I believe we’re about the same age, I think. So she’s like 36, 37. Jerry Connolly was 74 years old, and his supporters were like, “Yeah, he’s 74, but he’s like a young 74, cancer notwithstanding,” direct quote, “A young 74, cancer notwithstanding,” and Connolly- It’s just a wild caveat. I mean, that’s just a wild caveat. It’s comical. And he won and was promptly just like an inert and not particularly interesting chairman or ranking member. And he passed away recently. And it’s like that’s the problem. I get it. I get it, older members. Leadership may not like AOC all that much. They may think that she is too aggressive, whatever, but she’s unquestionably one of the most media savvy and compelling people in the Democratic Party. Why wouldn’t you want her to be the ranking member on your oversight committee, which offers plenty of opportunities to make noise against your opponents? Why wouldn’t you want to do that? And it demonstrates, as you said, it’s not even that they don’t want to elevate the person with the sharpest blade. They seem to be afraid of the blade, afraid of what it looks like to be that aggressive. You see this with the reaction to Zohran Mamdani, another compelling telegenic, charismatic Democrat, who you would think that any rational party would be like, “Yeah, let’s make this guy, let’s elevate this guy because he has it, whatever it is.” But there’s all this fear, all this worry that like, “Oh, he’s Muslim. Oh, he’s kind of left-wing. So voters are going to be…” But there’s no understanding that political leadership is a thing that exists and that you can shape the environment in which voters understand your party and your candidates ,and the Democratic Party’s refusal to do this has left it in a situation where voters don’t know what it stands for, that people who identify as Democrats think the party is weak, and that Republicans and conservatives can just make up stuff and say, “Yeah, Democrats said it.” And people, I guess they did. When you talk about Mamdani, I think about, if there was a, for lack of better term, a Bizarro Mamdani, where he was the exact opposite, but still charismatic and all of those things, he’d be a star in the Republican Party, and they’d be putting a lot of love behind him and pushing him forward. Whereas in the Democratic Party, they don’t want to touch him. And it’s just a really clear example of how party leadership seems to be out of step with the actual rank-and-file members of the party. This is so true, and it’s interesting. So back in the eighties there was a conclusion, there are many more moderate Democrats who felt that the party elite was out of step with the rank-and-file by which they meant that it had moved too far to the left. And so things like the Democratic Leadership Council, guys like Bill Clinton were trying to realign the party leadership with what they believed to be the moderate base of the party. And I’m not certain that they were wrong, because Clinton does end up winning two terms as president, Democrats have a pretty good [inaudible 00:17:25] so on, so forth. I think there’s a misalignment between the party base and the leadership, but I don’t think it’s an ideological misalignment, and I don’t think it’s an ideological misalignment because I think the figures who are rising to the top as people that rank-and-file Democrats are excited about, don’t have ideology in common. Zohran Mamdani, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, they’re all over the board of Democratic Party ideology. But what they have in common is a willingness to treat Republicans not as wayward colleagues, but as opponents, as people you have to beat and to be willing to be creative and compelling in attempting to do that. And that’s I think, where the mismatch is. You see, there are a lot of polls right now showing Democratic Party’s low overall approval, but so much of it is driven by actual Democratic voters looking to Washington and just being frustrated with Chuck Schumer and Jeffries and aging and inert leadership. If Democrats can solve that problem, if it can elevate people who understand that the moment that we’re in requires more fight, then those numbers are going to go up. So Jamelle, there is one thing in politics that drives me absolutely crazy. Whenever there’s an election, I hear people say, “We need candidate X in office because he’s a good businessman and we need government to run like a business.” What do you think about that? So I 100% agree about the notion that it’s absurd to want to think of government as a business. The goal of a business is to make a profit. The goal of a government is to deliver services. A businesses run like a little dictatorship, right? The CEO says, the boss says what goes. And the thing about businesses is a lot of them fail, but I’ll say that I think maybe one reason the public is so attracted to this notion of running the government like a business, aside from the way that our culture elevates the businessman as this figure of emulation, the entrepreneur. But I think one reason perhaps is that our government does not do a good job of delivering services in a way that makes it clear that this is a product of the government. So much of what our government does is obscured under layers of tax credits and incentives and that kind of thing. Direct benefits, a one-to-one relationship between, we say we’re going to do this, and this happens to you, few and far between, and I think it creates the impression that the government isn’t doing anything. I’m always struck by, people love social security, they love social security, they love Medicare, and I think one of the reasons is that social security is very simple. You see, in your check it says you pay your social security tax, and then when you turn 65 or 67, you get a check in return. It’s very straightforward. Yep. Simple. To go back to Mamdani, I’m convinced that part of his appeal isn’t even the substance of the policies, but the fact that they’re so simple. Free buses,. City grocery stores, rent control, that’s easy to understand. It’s simple. Our federal government doesn’t do this so well. I also think, to your point, that what Trump has done very well is made his policies simple. It’s Make America Great Again, and these are all the things that I’m going to do to enact that. And also, say what you want about Trump, he is a master marketer and he has an innate understanding of his audience. And so when the COVID checks went out and he made sure that his name was on it, even though he was opposed to the checks going out, when people got those checks, they saw his name on it. But the fact that the effective political messaging keeps it simple is a huge part of it. I think that’s absolutely right. I have a couple thoughts. The first is that, the example of Trump putting his name on the checks is such a great one. During the last year’s election, there was a rally where Obama was speaking, and Obama was praising Biden for not putting his name on his checks because that showed he was for the American people and not just for himself. But I saw that and I was like, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” that politics isn’t this game of showing how responsible you are. First of all, it’s winning elections, but second of all, it’s using rhetoric, public engagement, public speaking, public discourse to connect ordinary people to government and to persuade them that you will do better for them than the other guy. And that involves sending messages however you can. And so if writing your name on the check is what it takes to remind voters that you are doing something for them, you should do it. This is the basic insight of the old 19th century political machines. You’re an Irish immigrant. You show up in New York and boss, the Tammany machine, greets you, says, “Hey, I represent this neighborhood. You need a job, you need a place to live? Come to me. We’ll get you a job.” And the job is coming from Tammany, it’s coming from us, and the only thing we need from you is your support. Election comes along, give us a ballot. That’s all we need. That direct relationship, yeah, there’s corruption, whatever, but that represents a direct relationship between the representative, the system, and the voter. And Trump, I think kind of intuitively gets this. He’s very 19th century figure in a lot of ways. He intuitively gets this, and I’m not sure Democrats intuitively get this, some do, but I think that this older generation, existing leadership are too just acculturated in this era where that kind of directness seems like uncouth or inappropriate. But no, it’s exactly what’s needed. And yes, does it mean maybe that you can’t have big complicated policies anymore? Probably, but that’s probably a good thing to begin with. Maybe there should be a return to just simplicity in our policymaking, rather than trying to figure out what kind of tax credits you’re going to get if you make this kind of money, just say, “Oh, every family gets a flat amount of money to help with their kids. Everyone gets access to a basic level of healthcare. Everyone gets a flat amount of money to help pay for housing.” It’s simple and it’s direct thing. Roosevelt understood this. I mean, you go around the country, you’ll find buildings that still have that dude’s name stamped right in them, reminding you that you have this bill, you have this library, you have this courthouse, you have this playground because Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted you to have it, and that’s powerful. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

This story is part of the 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now The Democratic party and the climate movement have been “too cautious and polite” and should instead be denouncing the fossil fuel industry’s “huge denial operation,” the US senator Sheldon Whitehouse said. “The fossil fuel industry has run the biggest and most malevolent propaganda operation the country has ever seen,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in an interview on Monday with the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. “It is defending a $700-plus billion [annual] subsidy” of not being charged for the health and environmental damages caused by the burning of fossil fuels. “I think the more people understand that, the more they’ll be irate [that] they’ve been lied to.” But, he added, “Democrats have not done a good job of calling that out.” > “Turns out, none of [the science] really matters while the operation is > controlling things in Congress.” Whitehouse is among the most outspoken climate champions on Capitol Hill, and on Wednesday evening he delivered his 300th Time to Wake Up climate speech on the floor of the Senate. He began giving these speeches in 2012, when Barack Obama was in his first term, and has consistently criticized both political parties for their lackluster response to the climate emergency. The Obama White House, he complained, for years would not even “use the word ‘climate’ and ‘change’ in the same paragraph.” While Whitehouse slams his fellow Democrats for timidity, he blasts Republicans for being in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, an entity whose behavior “has been downright evil,” he said. “To deliberately ignore [the laws of physics] for short-term profits that set up people for huge, really bad impacts—if that’s not a good definition of evil, I don’t know what is.” The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s trade association, says on its website that “API and its members commit to delivering solutions that reduce the risks of climate change while meeting society’s growing energy needs.” Long before Donald Trump reportedly told oil company CEOs he would repeal Joe Biden’s climate policies if they contributed $1 billion to his 2024 presidential campaign, Republicans went silent on climate change in return for oil industry money, Whitehouse asserted. The key shift came after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on campaign spending. Before that, some GOP senators had sponsored climate bills, and John McCain urged climate action during his 2008 presidential campaign. But Citizens United, Whitehouse said, “told the fossil fuel industry: ‘The door’s wide open—spend any money you want in our elections.’” The industry, he said, promised the Republican party “unlimited amounts of money” in return for stepping away from bipartisan climate action: “And since 2010, there has not been a single serious bipartisan measure in the Senate.” > Democrats get stuck in a “stupid doom loop in which our pollsters say: ‘Well, > climate’s not one of the top issues that voters care about,’ so then we don’t > talk about it.” Whitehouse said that after delivering 300 climate speeches on the Senate floor, he has learned to shift from talking about the “facts of climate science and the effects on human beings to calling out the fossil fuels’ massive climate-denial operation”. He said: “Turns out, none of [the science] really matters while the operation is controlling things in Congress. I could take facts from colleagues’ home states right to them, and it would make no difference because of this enormous, multibillion-dollar political club that can [punish] anyone who crosses them.” Most Republicans even stay silent despite climate change’s threat to property values and other traditional GOP priorities, Whitehouse said. He noted that even the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell—who is not known for his climate bona fides, he said—testified before the Senate in February that in 10-15 years there will be whole regions of the country where nobody can get a mortgage because extreme weather will make it impossible to afford or even obtain insurance. Democrats can turn all this to their advantage if they get “more vocal and aggressive,” Whitehouse argued. “The good news is that the American people hate dark money with a passion, and they hate it just as much, if not more, in districts that went for Trump as in districts that went for Biden.” Democrats also need to recognize “how much [public] support there is for climate action,” he said. “How do you have an issue that you win 74 [percent] to 12 [percent] and you don’t ride that horse as hard as you can?” Whitehouse said he was only estimating that 74 percent figure, but that’s exactly the percentage of Americans who want their government to take stronger climate action, according to the studies informing the 89 Percent Project, the Guardian and other Covering Climate Now partner news outlets began reporting in April. Globally, the percentage ranges from 80 percent to 89 percent. Yet this overwhelming climate majority does not realize it is the majority, partly because that fact has been absent from most news coverage, social media and politicians’ statements. Democrats keep “getting caught in this stupid doom loop in which our pollsters say: ‘Well, climate’s not one of the top issues that voters care about,’ so then we don’t talk about it,” said Whitehouse. “So it never becomes one of the top issues that voters care about. [But] if you actually go ask [voters] and engage on the issue, it explodes in enthusiasm. It has huge numbers when you bother to engage, and we just haven’t.” Nevertheless, Whitehouse is optimistic that climate denial won’t prevail forever. “Once this comes home to roost in people’s homes, in their family finances, in really harmful ways, that [will be] motivating in a way that we haven’t seen before around this issue,” he said. “And if we’re effective at communicating what a massive fraud has been pulled on the American public by the fossil fuel industry denial groups, then I think that’s a powerful combination.”